Growth meeting wants your input

What do you want Gaston County to look like in the year 2050? That’s a question the CONNECT Our Future plan wants to answer. And the group wants residents to weigh in this Tuesday at a public input meeting.

What do you want Gaston County to look like in the year 2050? That’s a question the CONNECT Our Future plan wants to answer. And the group wants residents to weigh in this Tuesday at a public input meeting.

CONNECT Our Future is a growth plan for the Greater Charlotte region. It’s being administered by the Centralina Council of Governments. The agency estimates the region will have 1.8 million more people and 860,000 new jobs in the coming decades.

That’s a lot of growth, said Michelle Nance, planning director for Centralina Council of Governments. “There are big growth questions in the region that we need to address,” she said.

The plan will help with that. It seeks to figure out what counties want and then prioritize the requests to form one regional plan. When residents go online or to the input meeting, they’re asked to rank certain goals over others. Those goals include supporting local farms, working closer to home and having improved air and water quality.

CONNECT is now in its final stages. There have been several previous workshops held in Gaston County. Gaston residents prioritized farmland preservation and job creation, Nance said. “People were also very aggressive with transit and very aggressive with walkable communities and having that sense of community with a strong downtown,” she said. “Those and some others are ones we keep hearing.”

With the input from the other 13 counties, CONNECT pulled together four different plans — “maintain suburban focus,” “follow community plans,” “Grow Cities, Towns, Centers and Transit” and “Focus on Regional Transportation.”

In the public input meeting, residents will vote on each, identifying what they like and don’t like. Then, CONNECT will go back and put together one larger plan. That strategy will be shared with each of the 14 counties.

Whether they implement the steps is up to each county, Nance said. “There will be no formal adoption request,” she said. “It will just be something for them to use in their work, some strategies, best practices from around the region and county. So if your community wants to move forward on some of these things, here’s a way you can do that that has been tested in other places.”

You can reach reporter Lauren Baheri at 704-869-1842 or Twitter.com/lbaheri.

Want to go?

What: CONNECT Our Future County Forum

When: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday, March 18 with polling at 10:15, 12:15 and 2:15

Where: First United Methodist Church, 190 E. Franklin Blvd.

Why: ForGaston residents to voice their opinions for how the greater Charlotte region should grow over the next 40 years